Man, these guys are late to the party. Alcohol works great for treating symptoms of stress, too! Can't be stressed, anxious, or depressed if I'm blitzed out of my mind!
Do you homework.
Yes? This is how it can work.
If you can’t have some wine without cleaning out the village, it might be a sign of alcoholism.
It would be another thing entirely to REBRAND alcohol as a "therapy tool". FFS.
Of course it is. You have never seen an ad selling some drink as a tool for unwinding after a stressful day?
Anything psychologically active can be sold for therapeutic and recreational uses. And anything used for the latter can be abused.
You sound incredulous that psilocybin or mdma could be therapy tools. Are you a psychologist? Do you have any firsthand experience with these chemicals? Why are you skeptical?
Alcohol works acutely. So I totally agree the term therapeutic is an arbitrary label; all drugs have effects and thus can be therapeutic for condition X and deleterious for condition Y. But worth noting that psilocybin and MDMA produce enduring benefits whereas alcohol appears not to.
At the moment we don't have those.
We have strong denial in lots of people that cannabis might cause harm in some people.
All the stuff currently being said about LSD, MDMA, ketamine, etc was also said when prozac was introduced. We need to watch out for pharma companies who'll take something that's probably effective in some people (ketamine infusion for people with severe and treatment resistant depression) and rejig it to make it patentable (eskatamine) and repackage it so it can be used much more widely (nasal spray instead of infusion) and marketed much more widely.
Harmful relative to what? An ideal world where nobody drinks?
We've tried idealism via a prohibition and last I checked, that caused so much harm we went back to letting people have a drink.
A comparison of drugs vs no drugs ignores reality - we are not lab rats, we live within a society and a little vice lubricates the cogs of society. To deny that this is how it is, was and always will be is not helpful.
Your point regarding for-profit companies is valid - the likely solution to that is to control advertising so that it doesn't advertise drugs, as we have already successfully done with cigarettes.
The larger point is that there needs to be a balance of individual good vs collective. When society tips too heavily in the direction of collective, drugs/corruption/disobedience/crime will always be a 'problem' because there'll always be people who aren't interested in living to enable arbitrary collective goals somebody has decided everyone else ought to follow.
Long story short, it's a balancing act, maaan :)
The problem is alcohol abuse. It is problem for person health and public order.
Benzos are anxiolytics (stress reducers).
Which shows that your point about drug titration is spot on. And in a way that's in the pro column for stimulants. It's really easy to tell when the dose is too high. Both the sympathetic nervous response and the euphoric feelings get obviously counterproductive. On the other hand doctors have learned to be wary of self-reporting there on account of drug abusers wanting that artificial euphoria. Just goes to show that both the physician and the patient have to be honest partners working together to get the best results for well-being.
I guess the moral of the story is that there are many and legit reasons to take drugs that can affect people very differently, and who are we to judge? I will repeat this because I really found it to be nice to live by: live and let live, and whatever you do (context), do it responsibly and safely.
(edit: sure, fine, drink enough and you don't even know the world exist...)
Consumer protection and ability to address the supply chain only comes with legalization
Decriminalization is just 1800s snake oil’s salesmen at the World Fair
The real reason they remain in schedule 1 is because they've been around too long for any major pharma company to have a monopoly on them.
Cannabis isn't even a drug, it's a whole class of plants of a handful of related species. So it's the exception here.
Context: this is quoting Sigmund Freud, who mistakenly believed the drug to be non-addictive.
lol